ABSTRACT
It is well known that one of the basic contributions of M.N. Srinivas to the study of Indian society and culture is his concept and analysis of sanskritization. He used the concept fi rst in his doctoral dissertation on Coorg religion submitted to Oxford University in 1947 and published in 1952. As Srinivas himself noted later (1967, reprinted in Srinivas 2002: 221), the eminent linguist and historian Suniti Kumar Chatterjee (1950) also used the term almost at the same time as Srinivas used it, but without the two scholars knowing about one another’s work. This was similar to the well-known phenomenon in the physical sciences of a simultaneous discovery made by two or more scientists without knowing one another’s work.
